The operating system has to know where a file is located and what to do with it before it can open the file. File extensions are a method of telling the operating system what kind of file it is and by using associations what application should be used to open the file. The operating system uses the file extensionthe three letters after the period such as word.exe to determine the association.The .exe extension states that a file is an executable application. A .doc extension identifies the file as a word processing document that can be opened with MS Word, Wordperfect, Wordpad and several othe...

Back in the 1980s McDonalds decided to make ringing up products easier, minimize errors and save time by putting pictures (icons) of the food items on their cash registers. Following McDonalds lead, both Apple and Microsoft decided that rather than just listing the names of applications on the computers desktop, they would provide little pictures to the represent the programs. Usually the picture is the logo of the application. Clicking on the icon will launch the applications executable file. The first icon below will execute the Internet Explorer executable, iexplore.exe. The second icon wil...

One of the biggest features that Microsoft has been using to sell Vista besides its spectacular graphics capabilities is the ability to customize the operating system and truly personalize your PC. While you have always been able to customize windows, vista does allow you to customize the following items:Colors Desktop Background Screen Saver Sounds User account picture Windows Themes Windows Sidebar Sidebar GadgetsThe Control Panel Since windows 3.1, the windows control panel is the place to go if you want to change the default settings for any aspect of the windows graphical user...

With sound and video bring ubiquitous on the internet, in voice and video email, in computer games and even many of the latest applications, working sound has almost become a necessity to use your computer. Sound causes more problems than any other single thing on every personal computer operating system. Symptoms A computer with sound problems will display one or several of the following symptoms:There is no sound at all The sound keeps fading in and out The sound seems to skip or jump on everything you try to play The sound is distorted or scratchy on everything you try to play T...

As we become more dependent on email as a primary method of communication in both our professional and business life, errors can be especially annoying and possibly serious when it affects out livelihood. The table below lists to common error codes and the various methods of fixing the errors after that. I recommend you start repairs by performing each of the solution in order to get the best results. Ive listed them from the easiest to the most difficult. Common ErrorsError 0800ccc91 (POP3 username invalid)Error 0800ccc92 (POP3 password invalid)Error 0800ccc7d (Server does not suppo...

A windows .dll file is a dynamic link library which is a method that windows uses to house commonly used features to make application development easier and to maintain the modularity of modern programming. The windows operating system contains over 10 million lines of programming code. With out modular programming, a small change in one part of the code could cause the entire system to stop working. The idea behind the dlls is to let an application call common features such as printing, opening a hyperlink, opening and closing a file, etc. Many hardware drivers are now written as dll files to...

As the internet has matured it is no longer a media of static information. Interactive web pages are the rule rather than the exception. A lot of that interactivity has been made possible by Flash. Flash was originally created by the Macromedia Corporation as a way to animate two dimensional graphics to create cartoons that could be displayed on websites. Later it was used to create special effects such as sparkling and letting a picture fade in. Eventually the ability to add sound was incorporated. The final addition was the ability to drop video from actual cameras into the timeline. As a re...

We all know how important it is to backup our servers and personal computers but we all avoid doing it!! We just went through a major crisis in our servers and for some hours we thought we had lost all the info in them and our last backup of the databases was a few weeks old!! The rest of the content of the server was recoverable (one of the many good things of using CVS is that you keep many copies of the code in different computers), but the databases are critical. In the end we managed to solve the problem and everything is up and running now, with no data loss. But as you can imagi...

WordPress Ads WPAds is a WordPress plugin for showing and rotating ads in your blog. You only have to define the ad positions and the ads you want to rotate in each position, and WPAds will serve your ads randomly. WPAds can show contextual ads (ie, Google AdSense, Yahoo Publishers Network, etc) and also image banners. WPAds works very similarly to many adservers (as for example phpAdsNew), although with a much more limited functionality and specially tailored for using it in WordPress. The main concepts you have to understand are banners and zones. A banner is the ad you show, which can...

The latest news from YouTube is that they have announced a deal last Monday November 10th, 2008 with MGM to host some of the studios content. This new move is the latest effort by Googles YouTube to position itself as the player to be used for commercial online video space. The initial offers by MGM library have been pretty disappointing. It will feature such videos as episodes of American Gladiators and clips from Legally Blonde. Even though the initial offers arent great this is the step in the right direction for YouTube since it already dominates the user-generated content market. If th...